Context
“Remember, you are the key context for any interaction with AI.” Your decisions, your judgement, your skills, your intent.
An open educational resource for faculty
Context Is
All You Need
Using AI to code activities with students—and preserving the thinking, judgment, and human context that make the work matter.
Fresh from the desk
See one unfold.
“Students need authentic learning opportunities that invite them to use new technologies, like AI at certain times, and restrict it in others.”
— Our Duty of Care in the Age of AI, Rhetorica
A rotating look at featured builds — every few seconds one folds shut and the next opens. Hover or press pause to hold it still; click through to visit the live site.
Focused Reading Lab
Showing 1 / 18
Six galleries · 28 builds · organized by theme
Every gallery starts with a question.
“Remember, you are the key context for any interaction with AI… If you aren’t creative, intentional, or thoughtful in your use of AI, it will become the equivalent of a generic PowerPoint presentation.” Each gallery below gathers builds around one question Marc keeps returning to in Rhetorica.
Reading & Attention
“Could I make something using AI that students would want to engage with and read and not offload to AI?”Enter this gallery →
Discernment & Judgment
“The skill to navigate AI is discernment—learning when to use it and when to back away from it.”Enter this gallery →
Playable Texts & Worlds
“We can't effectively ban AI. We also cannot possibly keep up with AI. It is within this tension that we teach.”Enter this gallery →
Data & Public Engagement
“We can now create those experiences, edit them, take ownership of them, and respond in real time.”Enter this gallery →
Faculty Practice & Course Design
“Policy is higher education's love language. It affirms. It directs. It establishes shared norms and clarifies expectations.”Enter this gallery →
Galleries & Curiosities
“I like going to a LEGO store wall, filling a tiny box with as many bricks as I can, and figuring out what to make.”Enter this gallery →
Want everything on one page? Search the full catalog of 28 builds →
How I build with AI code
Human context is the method.
These five moves are the short version. Read the full how-to — with the screenshots and demo videos from the essays →
Ask what it is for
Name the practical thing, the people it is for, and the reason it should exist.
Build and rebuild
“It's your job to create it, but the wheel gives you speed to shape the material… Let AI be the wheel and bring your creativity to it.”
Maintain friction
Keep the parts of learning where students need to slow down, decide, cite, compare, and preserve reasoning.
Share and revise
Release, get feedback, compare versions, and make the open resource better.
Judgment, taste, constraint, iteration
Context Is All You Need
“AI is generic when we use it just to complete tasks.”Read Marc’s piece ↗Situated software for specific people
AI Is Quietly Changing Who Gets to Build Software
“If you can now build something practical using natural language, what would it be, and who would it be for?”Read Marc’s piece ↗Maintain beneficial friction
Reading in an Age of Thinking Machines
“Could I make something using AI that students would want to engage with and read and not offload to AI?”Read Marc’s piece ↗
Why this work matters
More possibilities than a yes/no AI policy.
Instead of creating endless wrapper apps that use AI tutors or summarizers, these builds let students and the public interact with data and historical artifacts in thoughtful ways. Faculty can create, edit, take ownership, and respond in real time.
The human context we need to nurture.
Remix it, teach it, make it yours
Start with an idea worth building.
Choose the friction
Decide what students should slow down to notice, compare, question, or make.
Bring context
Add your audience, activity, sources, constraints, visual direction, and examples.
Build in layers
Stylize it, map how it functions, build it, test it, and rebuild it.
Keep evidence visible
Let students export decisions, citations, uncertainty, and process—not just a polished answer.
Attribution and transparency
Who made what, and how.
Suggested attribution
Watkins, Marc. “Context Is All You Need: AI-Coded Activities for Teaching, Learning, and Public Engagement.” 2026.
Project concepts, teaching context, editorial direction, repositories, and underlying builds are by Marc Watkins unless a linked project states otherwise.
Live-site screenshots were captured from the linked GitHub Pages and Netlify projects on August 27, 2026. Follow each repository’s license, source notes, and attribution file when reusing a build.
AI disclosure
This catalog was organized and coded with OpenAI Codex, then redesigned and expanded into themed galleries with Anthropic’s Claude, both under Marc Watkins’s direction. AI assistance was used to inventory public repositories, identify version families, capture live-site screenshots, implement search and filters, and build the layered paper design.
Marc supplied the essays, project links, visual references, and the language that frames the process. All quoted language on this site comes from Marc’s newsletter Rhetorica, with each quote linked to its essay.
Browsing this catalog does not add an AI tutor or summarizer to the learning activities. The linked projects vary; consult each repository for its own disclosure.